/*Main Article Information*/ Issue Three August 2009 Book Review - Looking Backwards: 2000 to 1887 looking backwards Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy (a book available free on the Internet) Darwin O'Connor /*Main Article Text - Broken up into Article Sections - Picture top-left and Link at bottom*/ Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy was written in 1887 and describes a socialist utopia. Its plot is simple: Julian West, due to a freak hypnotism accident, falls asleep for 113 years. When he wakes up he is taken in by the Leete family that lives where his house used to stand. They explain to him the changes that society has made. Bellamy uses the plot to present his vision of an alternative society without resorting to a dry academic text. On being published it quickly became one the top selling books of the day, behind only Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, and sparked the formation of organizations to promote and try to implement its ideas. It also prompted the publication of many other books either expanding on its ideas or countering them. The alternative world of 2000 that Bellamy describes is one with far greater social progress, and far less technological progress, than we have today. All business is socially-owned, as is all real estate. People rent their homes, but buy their other personal possessions. Everyone receives the exact same wage throughout his or her life, no matter what job they do. People are attracted to jobs most consider less enjoyable by lower work hours. Money cannot be transferred from person to person, only used to buy things from the socially-owned stores. Work is mandatory until retirement age (45). To justify this, it is compared to military conscription, but for an infinitely better cause and much better conditions than war. While conscription occurred in almost every generation up until the end of World War II, it’s been more then 50 years since there has been conscription in Canada, so such a comparison may not be as persuasive today! Bellamy anticipated very little technological progress in the passage of time between 1887 and 2000. Everyone has electricity and a telephone, but there is no wireless communication, nor computers, let alone rocket ships to the moon. It’s still a world of pneumatic tubes and hand-written bills of sale. Bellamy’s description of society in 1887 is remarkable inasmuch the basic social relations described have persisted in many ways into 2009: By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode. While the coach has now had tires installed and the road has been paved, we still pull the rich along. On the role of women, while not quite up to today’s standard of equality, Bellamy’s views would probably been considered radical in the nineteenth century. Rather then being expected to stop working after marriage, they were required to work just as men were, only taking time off to raise children. Some jobs were only open to men and others only open to women. Woman’s jobs where less arduous and had shorter hours. Women had their own separate elected hierarchy. One infers that a woman could not be President, as the post of President is at the top of the men’s hierarchy. It’s almost disheartening to read the how easily the society solved problems of the 19th century while we struggle with the same problems. Today most people can’t even imagine how society might be organized differently. This book allows us to envision alternatives and remember that all that it takes to implement them is public determination. The copyright has long since expired and the book is freely available on the Internet. Copies are available at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Looking_Backward_From_2000_to_1887 and http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/624